T. De Witt Talmage eBook

But the story of my brother’s work has already
been told in the Heavens by those who, through his
instrumentality, have already reached the City of
Raptures. However, his chief work is yet to come.
We get our chronology so twisted that we come to believe
that the white marble of the tomb is the milestone
at which the good man stops, when it is only a milestone
on a journey, the most of the miles of which are yet
to be travelled. The Chinese Dictionary which
my brother prepared during more than two decades of
study; the religious literature he transferred from
English into Chinese; the hymns he wrote for others
to sing, although he himself could not sing at all
(he and I monopolising the musical incapacity of a
family in which all the rest could sing well); the
missionary stations he planted; the life he lived,
will widen out and deepen and intensify through all
time and all eternity.

Never in the character of a Chinaman was there the
trait of commercial fraud that assailed our American
cities in 1879. It got into our food finally—­the
very bread we ate was proven to be an adulteration
of impure stuff. What an extravagance of imagination
had crept into our daily life! We pretended even
to eat what we knew we were not eating. Except
for the reminder which old books written in byegone
simpler days gave us, we should have insisted that
the world should believe us if we said black was white.
Still, among us there were some who were genuine,
but they seemed to be passing away. It was in
this year that the oldest author in America died,
Richard Henry Dana. He was born in 1788, when
literature in this country was just beginning.
His death stirred the tenderest emotions. Authorship
was a new thing in America when Mr. Dana began to
write, and it required endurance and persistence.
The atmosphere was chilling to literature then, there
was little applause for poetic or literary skill.
There were no encouragements when Washington Irving
wrote as “Knickerbocker,” when Richard
Henry Dana wrote “The Buccaneer,” “The
Idle Man,” and “The Dying Raven.”
There was something cracking in his wit, exalted in
his culture. He was so gentle in his conversation,
so pure in his life, it was hard to spare him.
He seemed like a man who had never been forced into
the battle of the world, he was so unscarred and hallowed.

It was just about this time that our Tabernacle in
Brooklyn became the storm centre of a law-suit which
threatened to undermine us. It was based upon
a theory, a technicality of law, which declared that
the subscriptions of married women were not legal
subscriptions. Our attorneys were Mr. Freeman
and Judge Tenney. Theirs was a battle for God
and the Church. There were only two sides to the
case. Those against the Church and those with
the Church. In the preceding eight years, whether
against fire or against foe, the Tabernacle had risen
to a higher plane of useful Christian work. I
was not alarmed. During the two weeks of persecution,